Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on  September 28, 2017

The goal of this document is to share our findings regarding the event, specify the root cause analysis, outline actions to be taken to solve the downtime event, as well as preventive measures Ex Libris is taking to avoid similar cases in future.

Event Timeline

Intermediate service interruptions were experienced by Ex Libris customers served by the Alma EU01 instance at our European Data Center during the following time period:

September 28th,  2017 from 04:10 AM until 06:08 AM Amsterdam time.

During the event, the service was unavailable for the environment.

Root Cause Analysis

Ex Libris Engineers investigated this event to determine the root cause analysis with the following results:

During database (DB) administrator activities, a malfunction occurred resulting in a corrupted DB file.
After several attempts to resolve the issue, our engineers decided that a DB shutdown is required in order to fully recover the database.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

Ex Libris has taken the following action and preventive measures to avoid such an occurrence in future:

• The database was fully recovered with Oracle tools
• Ex Libris engineers are extending the automation in order to reduce the need of database administration activities to minimum, to include the activity performed in this incident as well as further activities

Customer Communication

ExLibris is committed to providing customers with prompt and ongoing updates during Cloud events. Ongoing and prompt updates on service interruptions appear in the system status portal at this address: http://status.exlibrisgroup.com/

These updates are automatically sent as emails to registered customers.

Publication History